


Chess

by daystarsearcher



Series: Modern U.N.I.T. Infernoverse stories [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Chess, Chess Metaphors, F/F, Garden metaphors, Gardens & Gardening, Regime Change, fallout of an abusive relationship, hard conversations, restorative justice, some suicidal ideation, when you've been socialized that feelings are weakness all communication is through metaphor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:15:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27163054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daystarsearcher/pseuds/daystarsearcher
Summary: Ten years later, it turns out Osgood's idea of restorative justice is an island. Sequel to "The Pieces That Get Sacrificed."
Relationships: Kate Lethbridge-Stewart/Petronella Osgood
Series: Modern U.N.I.T. Infernoverse stories [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/470818
Comments: 48
Kudos: 34





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for all your patience waiting for this first chapter of the sequel! If you're in the U.S., vote by November 3rd!

“Pawn takes queen,” said Osgood. “Check.”

#

_Eight months earlier:_

The island was a blur.

After the years of solitary confinement, Kate Stewart’s good eye was good only relative to the one with a scar straight through it. Everything further than twenty feet away—the exact length of the dark cell she had spent nine years in— went fuzzy and indistinct. In the courtroom for the show trial the new coalition government had insisted on—never mind that Kate had been a decade-long prisoner of the state they had just overthrown, she had once served it, and must face the music with all the rest— this had meant that other than the judge and prosecutor, the sea of faces turned out to see if she would hang for her crimes was a merciful blur of brown and pink, an amateur Impressionist painting.

On the island, it meant she tripped a lot.

The guards didn’t kick her when she fell on her way from the boat to her new prison, just gripped her arms and hauled her to her feet none too gently.

She wondered if Dr. Petronella Osgood had had anything to do with that.

She remembered Osgood’s voice in the courtroom, coming from a chair below a window through which the afternoon light had blazed, a golden glow conspiring with her weakened eye to hide the younger woman in a corona of myopic fire. Her voice came from that blur, so startlingly familiar even after a decade, testifying to everything Kate had done, both in service to the former government and in pursuit of her own desires.

Osgood was the reason that Kate Stewart would never go free from this island.

Osgood was also the reason Kate Stewart wasn’t dead.

#

There was a cottage on the island, which the guards let her know—with the fewest words but the greatest amount of cold contempt possible—was where Kate would live for the rest of her life. They were not forthcoming on how long they expected that to be.

The cottage had only two doors that had not been taken off their hinges: the entrance, and the one to the room in which a cot had been shoved up below the window. Every room but that one was wired, not even a token effort made to hide the cameras and microphones. Kate wondered at the concession to privacy; that it existed, and that it had been granted for the bedroom but not the loo.

A strange feeling, to be wondering again. Thought had shut down after a certain number of interrogations that first year, and fossilized in all the silent years that had followed that.

Her hands shook slightly as she steadied herself against the wall, watching the guards retreat to their barracks through the kitchen window.

It had been a bad decade.

When she could breathe past the memories, she continued exploring. The kitchen contained no utensils or anything that could remotely be considered a weapon, but the pantry had bottled water, powdered milk, and a few soups that she could warm in the microwave. A few packets of something their labels claimed to be ‘caffeinated strawberry flavoring powder,’ which Kate had to read several times to make sure that she hadn’t gone mad.

The final room contained a low coffee table bolted to the floor between two chairs, also bolted to the floor to prevent her from pulling them apart into weapons. An iron ring was embedded deep in the wood of the table, the splinters around it testimony to the fact that it had been recently added.

Kate stared at the ring for a long time.

#

The guards delivered food and other essentials, but otherwise kept to themselves.

Kate was not sentenced to the house. She could leave, and walk the island, but as soon as she stepped outside, two guards would exit the barracks and trail her from a distance of about thirty feet. She developed a routine: mixing the caffeinated powder into one of the water bottles, and then going for a brisk walk until she was thirsty enough to drink past the chalky half-candy, half-medicinal taste. When she managed to finish, she would make her way back to the cottage, where she would microwave one of the soups to warm her chilled bones, and spend the rest of the day pacing in the house itself, trying to make it give up its secrets. As if on this turn around the kitchen she would find a clue in the tarnished steel of the sink, or the worn grooves in the handle above the window.

She would get stuck at the windows for hours sometimes, watching the sea, the curl and the crash of the waves hypnotizing in their endless motion—other times, she would watch the barracks, the lights that went on and off, the muffled shouts and thumps of feet whose cadence she could still recognize dimly as a military drill, the occasional glimpse of a soldier leaving to patrol the coastline or take a delivery from the supply boat.

She preferred the ocean. It didn’t watch back.

She had no idea where the island was. Off the coast of Britain, she thought on one of her long morning walks, hugging herself against the chill of the wind as she looked out over the gravelly beach and the slate-grey waves. This was the weather she had felt on her face when they took her from her cell after the guilty verdict, right before they’d put the bag over her head and bundled into the back of a transport vehicle.

She had been expecting to be taken to a firing range and shot.

She had been expecting to be shot for a decade.

Kate turned and wended her way up the coastline to the stand of trees near the cliff, a half-dozen scraggly pines where she could take a moment to rest, leaning her hand against the sticky bark and breathing in that sweet-sap smell, pretending their thin branches were shelter from the wind.

Not much, this stand of trees, but still a destination. This island was barely three miles in circumference by her estimate. The cottage, the barracks, a small shed, and a thin patch of nature clinging to the sand trapped between slabs of limestone and granite.

Here, for the rest of her life, then. Assuming the guards weren’t ordered to suffocate her in her sleep and toss her body to the gulls, but there were quicker and easier ways to kill people you never wanted to see again.

A strange punishment, an island. A stranger gift.

Osgood seemed to have done well for herself, from what Kate had heard in the court. The prosecution had treated her with deference, not just another victim of the infamous Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. There had been an apology in his voice when he had asked Osgood the when and the where and the how often of her coercion into Kate’s bed.

Osgood’s voice had been clear and to the point in her answers. No theatrics, but she had not spared any detail.

_And why did you accept this arrangement, Dr. Osgood?_

_I had no choice. And it could have been worse._

She wanted to argue with that memory, _but I gave her a choice_ \--

The cold wind speared her through her jacket with its contempt.

The memories would not let her rest, now: all the things she had forgotten, all the things she had made herself forgot—Osgood on the first car ride with her broken glasses and her hands clasped so carefully in front of her in the handcuffs; Osgood’s head whipping up on her entrance into the lab, anxiety and eagerness warring twins in her eyes; Osgood in the dark, her shoulders tensing as she spread her thighs, the heat of her and her soft cry when Kate took her too roughly—

She hadn’t thought of Osgood in years, and now she couldn’t stop the younger woman’s words from echoing in her head, stealing in like whispers along with the shrieking of the wind.

_no choice_

#

The thing about solitary is that you think it would give you nothing but time, time that you would have to fill up with memories like motion pictures rotating reels of film. You would think that you would play the film of your life over and over until you remember things long forgotten in sharp and startling details.

It is true that in solitary you have nothing but time. But when you have nothing but time, time becomes everything, and the crushing weight of that time makes it a Sisyphean effort to pull yourself back into the past or ponder anything in the future; makes it impossible, eventually, to feel anything but the present moment, the emptiness of it so heavy that it permeates every cell of your being—

And now Kate was out. In the world, if a cold and empty world near-devoid of human life.

It was enough like solitary that the words and memories did not rush back in. It was different enough that they still squeezed through the cracks, uncurling slowly like slender ivy that could bring down stone walls.

_I had no choice_

The guards had told her that Osgood was coming soon.

#

Osgood came on a helicopter, not the weekly food delivery boat as Kate had been expecting. Squinting, she could just make out the official seal, and added another scrap to the hoard of information she was gathering as careful as a bird feathering its nest: Osgood was working for the new government.

Kate saw the helicopter for only a few moments through the window, straining her back and shoulders to catch even that glimpse. She couldn’t stand because an hour previous, two guards had marched her to one of the living room chairs and handcuffed her to a chain newly strung through the iron ring fixed to the coffee table. It was a very short chain, doubtless to keep her from using it to strangle anyone—they were really crediting her with much more energy than she had—which had the added effect of forcing her to lean forward several degrees into a not-quite bow.

“Hello.”

Kate momentarily forgot the chain, and jerked up. The cuffs bit into the edge of her wrists, but she barely noticed.

Petronella Osgood stood tall in an upmarket black wool coat, her arms crossed in front of her. She had gone from late twenties to late thirties with only a little thinning of her round face, and the same deep brown eyes peered out from behind thick spectacles.

There was a little line on her forehead that deepened as she looked down, but the rest of her face was inscrutable.

“You’re looming,” Kate said dryly.

Osgood opened her mouth in a shape that might have been the word ‘sorry,’ but no sound came out. She took a step closer to the chair opposite, but did not sit.

Kate’s heart kicked at her ribs.

“If you’re going to shoot me,” Kate went on, still trying to divine some spark of emotion from that shuttered face, “do you think you could do it soon? Or sit? This is a deeply uncomfortable angle.”

She regretted the bravado almost as soon as it left her mouth; if Osgood wanted Kate to be in pain, she had just handed her a way to make that happen on a silver platter.

But Osgood sat.

A rush of relief unwelcome in its intensity—no matter what else had changed, Osgood was still no sadist.

The younger woman’s body was still tense, as though Kate were a tiger who might spring across the table. Her throat worked for a second, and then, abrupt: “The guards--they’re treating you all right?”

Something in Kate’s chest twisted.

“That would imply they ever speak to me,” she said. “But they’re not _mis_ treating me, if that’s what you mean. It’s a considerable step up from my former accommodations.” She tilted her head, trying to read any sort of message in the way Osgood nodded, quick, businesslike. She felt exposed, tried to cover it with the kind of sardonic barb she barely remembered as her signature weapon. “Was that the answer you were looking for, or should they have been whipping me regularly?”

Osgood drew back into her chair, squared her shoulders. “They were instructed not to harm you.”

“Now why would you do that?” Kate asked. She could not keep the bitterness from her voice, thick and harsh as tea left to steep for too long. “Saving me for you, perhaps?” She jangled the chain. “Turnabout is fair play and all that.”

“I’m not going to touch you,” Osgood said stiffly.

She wanted to stand, to grab Osgood by the shoulders and shake her, to demand answers. Had she felt this powerless even in that first year of interrogations? They had humiliated her, stripped her bare and shaved her head, taken her on a world tour of torture techniques, strappado one day, electroshock the next—but she had always remembered her role, she had always known who her enemy was.

She had never thought of Osgood as the enemy, and yet here they were, opposite sides of the room and only one bound.

“You never struck me as the type to inflict violence, sexual or otherwise,” she said with a flippancy that she did not feel. “But things change.”

“Not that much.”

There was a long silence, Osgood looking at Kate with that wary, uncertain gaze that itched her like cheap wool. Her shoulders still ached even though she did not have to strain as much as before to look Osgood in the eyes. The younger woman twitched in the chair, and Kate was seized with a certainty near panic that she was about to stand, that she would stand and walk out of the cottage and leave her here alone on this cold rock to shrivel up and die.

She lashed out.

“I was never any good at guessing games, Dr. Osgood, so if you want information, or for me to take you into the conveniently un-bugged bedroom and fuck you like old times, or something else entirely, you’re going to have to say.”

Osgood started so violently that her chair rocked in its iron bolts, a harsh shriek. The guard at the door stepped forward, his hand on his holster, but Osgood raised her hand, staying him. She breathed deep, in the way Kate recognized as her trying her hardest not to wheeze.

When she looked back up at Kate, her face was still again, but her eyes were furious, and cold.

“Do you know what you did to me?”

“You gave a fairly comprehensive overview at the trial.”

“Not that.” The words come through gritted teeth. “What you did when you sent me away.”

Well, this was unexpected.

“I saved your life,” Kate said slowly. “Do you know why I survived after that first year of interrogations?” She felt time stretching out as she spoke, the same way it stretched out in the interrogation chamber, hours of pain in a single second— “Because some pencil pusher I never saw did the maths and decided the chance I might provide some useful information in future was marginally more likely than not, and therefore worth the cost of my starvation diet to the state. So he signed a piece of paper and forgot about me, and after your little resistance friends starting bombing our foreign possessions, I suddenly became very low priority for everyone involved. You—” there is a longing in that word she wants to scourge from her throat—“You would have been dead in weeks.”

“I asked to stay,” said Osgood.

“You didn’t know what you were signing up for.”

“Not much different than anything else with you then,” Osgood said quietly.

Kate flinched.

Osgood’s hands were clenched in her lap. Her voice not much louder than a whisper: “I was in that crate, in the dark, for a week. It was cold and filthy and you hadn’t told me anything about what to expect so I was terrified of every movement and sound around me. When they opened up the crate I didn’t know if they were here to rescue me or kill me. I didn’t have a name for six months; I was “Kate Stewart’s bitch” until the tenth time I saved their lives.”

Kate forced herself not to look away from Osgood. It was like staring directly into the sun. Her throat ached.

“You proved yourself, though,” she said. Her voice like gravel. “You rose above. You’re alive.”

Osgood pierced her with those sharp eyes. “So are you.”

“And I gather I have you to thank for that,” Kate said. She tried to soften her expression; she was never the best at peaceful overtures, and the years of solitude had left her face feeling like a mask, stiff and unresponsive to her mind’s commands. “Can you blame me for wondering if this was quid pro quo?”

“I told the truth,” Osgood said. “It was what you deserved.”

Her voice was a knife, and Kate did not know if she meant Kate deserved the punishment, or the mercy.

“Yes, well.” Her back was killing her, craning her neck to keep looking up at Osgood as if she were some divine arbiter of justice. “You were the only one interested in truth, then. Your precious new government certainly didn’t mind inflating and conflating whatever charges it could, or making them up out of whole cloth. If that prosecutor could have ever seen how you made eyes at me—”

Osgood stood abruptly, the wood of her chair shrieking in protest as it was wrenched against iron rods, and Kate was seared with equal parts triumph and despair; she had hit a tender spot and scored a point, but if the cost was Osgood leaving—

Osgood did not wheel towards the door. She took a deep breath.

“There are rules,” she said. “I should have started with them, but—I’m telling you them now. Number one: you don’t touch me. You don’t ever touch me.”

She looked at Kate as if Kate were diseased, as if Kate were some foul hideous thing she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe.

“You used to like me touching you,” Kate said for the acid splash burn of the words hitting Osgood where she stood, the way she could see the memories she could summon with a sentence whiplash across her former protégé’s face: Osgood pressed against some luxurious fur in the coat room of a government party, panting with her head thrown back, skirt rucked up past her thighs, her arousal coating Kate’s hand as she clenched around her fingers: _oh please, ma’am…oh, more, please…_

Osgood’s hands clenched at her sides, hard fists. “You don’t talk about my body. You don’t talk about what you did to me, or doing anything to me now. You don’t ask questions about any of my relationships before or after you.”

“Or what?” Kate asked. Her heart was pounding. Why was Osgood still here? Hadn’t she done enough to send her away? “You have me beaten? You whip me? You call that bodyguard over for his gun and put a bullet in my brain? You’ve been associating with too many politicians for your own good; you’ve flip-flopped your position on violence in under five minutes.”

“Or I don’t come back,” Osgood said, breathing hard. “I don’t have to come back. The guards and the birds can be sufficient company.”

She strode towards the door.

The chain rang against the bolt as Kate tried to rise and was jerked back down—damn these handcuffs, damn this island, damn Osgood! “Why did you come in the first place?”

Osgood turned to look at her. Her face was still again, except for her eyes. Her eyes looked at Kate as if were searching for something.” To check on you. I owed you that.”

There was a long silence, Osgood standing as if pulled between two magnetic poles, Kate clenching the muscles of her legs to keep from launching to her feet again. She felt blood slide down her hand where the cuff had cut into her skin, and turned her wrist instinctively inwards. Hide the weakness.

“I survived nine years in solitary,” Kate said. Her voice felt like it was coming from somewhere outside her body. “The year before that I spent being interrogated every day. What makes you think I’m so desperate for social intercourse?”

“You used me for a year, Ms. Stewart,” Osgood said. She was apparently exempt from her own rules on discussing the past, Kate noted bitterly. “Do you really think I could spend that much time with you—how did you put, ‘seeing to your needs’—and not learn anything about you?”

Every fiber of Kate’s body screamed at her to bluff, to hide, to put up a false front. She opened her mouth to issue a cutting retort about how Osgood overvalued herself, whores like her were a dime a dozen—

“And if you don’t want my company,” Osgood was saying, “I’m sure you’d like Beth’s.”

Kate’s heart stopped.

“Beth is alive?” she said through a mouth that was suddenly dry. “Beth is…alive.”

Osgood looked at her with an expression that Kate had never seen her direct at her before.

Pity.

“I hadn’t told you the rules yet,” Osgood said. “So I’ll be back in a month. You can have that time to think about what you want.”

#

Kate paced the house, back and forth, rubbing the sore spots on her wrists. She had ripped off the bandages the guards slapped on; could still hear their words—to each other, not to her—about cinching the cuff tighter next time so she couldn’t get enough force to cut herself. She hadn’t hidden her injury from Osgood well enough after all.

She hadn’t hidden any of her weaknesses from Osgood well enough.

Kate could kick herself, for a thousand things. For taking Osgood as a protégé in the first place, when she knew damn well what the system had done to her father, how he had ended up relying on the good opinions of people who should have been no more to him than pets. For not staying calm when she’d damned well had warning, had known for a week, that Osgood was coming. For not asking about Beth first thing, instead of riling up Osgood, trying to draw blood. For not pretending indifference when Osgood did bring up Beth, _so Beth made it_ , she could have said coolly, _well done, her; still, I don’t imagine we have much to say to each other_ …

So many ways Osgood could use her daughter to hurt her. The obvious ones, violent and unsubtle, deliveries of photographs and body parts. Or else poison Beth against her, tell her lies—or the truth would suffice—and broadcast her denunciation of her mother. Or else simply hold the possibility of Beth, of calls or letters or visits, over her head; change the rules, move the goalposts, and she would comply with simpering subservient obedience because it was her goddamn _daughter--_

Surely Osgood would never—

But if Kate had just—

On and on it went, a merciless water wheel in her brain.

It had been easier in solitary, with the press of all that time that made it impossible to do anything but exist, to keep from thinking about her daughter.

But now—she thinks of what Osgood told her about her passage, _cold_ and _filthy_ and _terrified_ \--she’d tried to take more care with her daughter, but her primary concern had been speed, and if she had misjudged the men who had taken her money to put Beth on private helicopter on an unregistered course to France—

And even if she hadn’t misjudged them, if all Beth knew was waking in the middle of the night and men with guns taking her away from everything she had ever known—

She tried to imagine Beth as she would be now, but there were too many possible Beths, too many threats Kate could not have shielded her against from her cell, too many winding and diverging paths her daughter could have taken since the last time she had seen her, and when had she last seen her? Kate struggled to extract the memory from the echoing blank void that seemed to have eaten away at her past as the dark of her cell had eaten away at her good eye. Had it been the Christmas holiday? But no, she had sent permission for Beth to stay at the school; there had been a Zygon incursion in London that required her attention…July then, she could see her now, that scowl and her arms shoved in her pockets as she strode away after dinner, just fast enough to let her mother know that it was an insult, just slow enough that Kate could not call her to account for it—but that couldn’t have been the last time, could it? She would have seen Beth after that at least once, even if she’d had to delegate driving her up for the next term…

She tried again to focus on the memory of Beth as a seventeen-year-old, tried to age it up: smooth the bitten nails, tuck the stray hairs behind her ears, unhunch the shoulders so that she stood straight, a woman looking back at her with an expression she could not imagine.

It all fell apart into the memory of Beth as a small child, her little hand gripping Kate’s tightly as they watched a storm outside the windows. Kate had told her the names of all the clouds, and how lightning could not hurt them, and Beth had leaned hard into her leg, her tiny fingers starting to loosen and then gripping again tightly, her eyes trying to close but determined to show her mother how strong she was, how unafraid…

That little girl was gone forever, even if Beth consented to see her again.

Kate pressed her head against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut, squeezing her hands into fists. The island was suddenly too small; it had always been small, but now she could feel it like the scant coastline was walls pressing in on her. She felt the silence of the guards, weeks and weeks of silence, stone walls pressing in. She couldn’t breathe—

Her last conversation with Osgood echoed in her head over and over again. If she had said this instead—or that—if she had stayed silent here…Would Osgood have stayed longer? Would anything have gone differently?

This was the problem with knowing you could have things; it made you want more than was offered.

It made you want more than was possible.

#

“Well?” Osgood said from where she stood in the door.

“I’ll behave,” Kate said archly. Her back was straighter this time, the chain shorter but the ring moved closer to the edge of the table. The dark splinter-edged hole where it had first been anchored stared up at her like a warning eye.

Osgood wavered a second in the doorway, as if distrustful of the older woman’s tone. Kate squared her shoulders, forced herself to keep looking her in the eye even as her body fought instinctively to cringe, to bare her neck in submission.

Osgood sat on the edge of the chair as if she might get back up at any moment. She gazed steadily back at Kate.

The silence between ticked on.

So it was going to be like this then. The first move up to Kate, within the parameters that had been laid out, and if she mis-stepped, whether purposefully or accidentally, game over.

Time for a strategic surrender.

“I apologize,” she said stiffly, “for misspeaking on our previous visit. It won’t happen again.”

Osgood inclined her head in acknowledgment, and took a deep breath. “Do you have any questions about Beth?”

The number of questions Kate had surged like adrenaline through her veins. She struggled to keep her voice level. “How is she?”

“She’s well.” Osgood’s shoulders came down from her ears a half inch as she spoke. “She arrived safely in Paris. I understand General Bambera herself took an interest in her welfare. She was able to complete her schooling, and took a geology degree.”

 _Took an interest_ echoed through Kate’s head with all its possible implications from innocent to sinister, and she had to bite back a flood of questions she knows that Osgood couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. If the General had touched one hair of Beth’s head—“Where is she now?”

“I can’t answer that,” Osgood said. Her tone neutral, but that expression in her eyes again, understanding too deeply tinged with pity for Kate to swallow. “Policy. In case you escape.”

Kate laughed harshly. “What a big, bad monster all of you have made of me. Five minutes in that ocean with my arthritis and you’ll be saving a fortune on soup and bottled water.”

“Do you need anything for that?” The words spilled out quickly. “Medication, or…anything.”

Was that guilt tingeing Dr. Osgood’s voice? Kate filed away that tidbit for later, but she didn’t want to be distracted now. “Does Beth know I’m here?”

Osgood hesitated. “Yes.”

The relief that swamped Kate would have brought her to her knees if she hadn’t already been seated. She struggled to keep it from seeping into her voice, along with the hope that was struggling out of her iron grip. There was a possibility…

“Will she—” She thought of Beth stepping out of the helicopter, staring out at the island, staring out at her chained here—

Pure cowardice overwhelmed her; she changed the question.

“Do you have any messages from her?”

“No. Sorry. I did ask.”

Dimly Kate felt a distant part of her filing away Osgood’s apology, the first she had given and probably unintentional. She thought of all those long cold nights, all those hard decisions, the orders she had given: fire on that alien research vessel, interrogate that prisoner, execute that soldier who had disobeyed her orders. All the blood and broken bone of her work that had woken her with nightmares that she justified every time with a single sentence: _It will keep Beth safe_

And sometimes with a follow-up: _I will not lose her like Gordy._

“I see.” Her voice was thin but at least it did not waver. “Well, she wouldn’t be a Lethbridge-Stewart if she didn’t carry on the grand tradition of being ashamed of at least one parent.”

“It’s not—” Osgood cut off abruptly, and huffed—not at Kate, but at herself. Kate felt her interest kindle again; had Osgood been about to say something she shouldn’t? “That might be a factor. But it’s a complex situation.”

Osgood had been speaking to her daughter. Not just to ask if she had messages to pass on, but enough to know details she didn’t feel she could share with Kate.

“Complex how?” Kate said, trying not to leap out of her skin. Osgood had been talking to _her daughter—_

“That’s not for me to say.”

Osgood had apparently learned political double-speak in the ten years that she had been free from Kate, but she was still far from fluent in it. The way she clamped down her jaw after reciting the rote words was as good as saying aloud, _It would not be politically expedient for Beth to visit right now._

But not politically expedient for whom? For Osgood, which would imply a chink in her armor, perhaps an antagonist she needed to hold off? For Beth, which would imply that she was more than a simple geologist? Or for an unnamed third party, one pulling the strings or paying the salaries of Osgood, Beth, or both?

Kate was aware that she had been silent for too long, that she needed to think of other questions to ask, but if she had to say one more word about her daughter— _alive, alive, her daughter was alive and possibly never wanted to see her again but alive_ \--she would start to lose control. She switched tacks.

“Am I allowed to ask about your work?”

“Not in any detail. But…” She allowed a small smile to ghost across her lips. “It’s good work. I enjoy it.”

“Science, still?”

“Yes. And that’s really all I can say about it.” She shrugged. “It’s not as if I had any other relevant work experience.”

There was nothing Kate could say to that that would not break the rules.

“I see,” she said to keep the silence from looming its head again.

The silence that might mean Osgood would leave.

“Do you want to play chess?” Osgood asked abruptly.

Kate raised an eyebrow. “Is this a new interrogation technique? If I don’t cooperate, do you break out the Monopoly?”

Osgood shook her head, but her lips were pressed together as though she were trying not to smile. “Thought you were going to behave.”

Kate leaned back a little in her chair. “Tell me what rule I broke.”

Osgood mirrored her posture, that little not-quite-smile still playing about her lips. “You’re just afraid you’re going to lose.”

 _I’ve already lost,_ Kate thought. She pasted on her bravest smile. “I’ve spent the last nine years staring at a wall trying not to go mad, Dr. Osgood.” Was that a flicker of guilt again in those big brown eyes? Interesting, interesting. _Oh, Dr. Petronella Osgood, I will find a way to the heart of you yet…_ “Of course I’m going to lose.”

#

“Knight to E4,” Kate said.

Osgood moved the piece for her, since the shortened chain didn’t allow her to reach the travel chess set that Osgood had set up on her side of the table.

That Osgood had been very careful to set up on her side of the table, so that there was no way Kate could possibly touch her.

“Bishop takes rook,” said Osgood, and did so.

“Blast.” Kate surveyed the board and tried to figure out what to say next. Her chest was unexpectedly tight at the effort it took to survey the board, pulled so far away from her that an inch of it trembled over the edge of the table closest to Osgood. _What a big, bad monster…_ “Bridge always was more my game.”

“I could bring cards next time,” Osgood offered. “Bring a couple of the guards in to partner.”

“Oh, they’ll love that,” Kate said dryly. “Bridge with a tool of the fascist state they already have to babysit, bet that’s exactly why they signed up.”

Osgood frowned, and for a second Kate thought she was going to ask about mistreatment again. “Well, in any case, chess is all I have at the moment.”

“And why do you have a travel chess set?” Kate asked, although of all the things Osgood could have pulled out of her little black bag, a travel chess set was in many ways the least surprising. “See a lot of call for that, do you?”

Osgood’s cheeks pinked. “Occasionally.”

“Play a lot of chess with your coworkers?” _Play any chess with my daughter?_ she wanted to ask, but it was so soon, Osgood wasn’t off-kilter enough to surprise an honest answer.

“Sometimes.” Osgood shrugged, the blush fading slightly. “A bunch of scientists, there’s always a chess nut in the group. Gives you something to do while you wait for the proteins to synthesize or the data to compile. Other than pace, or eat your own weight in biscuits.”

“I’ve always been partial to pacing, myself,” Kate said. “No offense to the local chef, I’m sure, but the food here doesn’t encourage overeating.”

“The food can be negotiated,” Osgood said, almost absently as her eyes continued to sweep the board. Her eyes had that far-away look Kate remembered—suddenly, vividly, with a gut-stabbing sharpness—when she was writing code or running numbers in her head. Was she planning her next chess move? Or her next move with Kate? She snapped her fingers, summoning the guard three steps closer. “Get Ms. Stewart a pencil and paper for some requests.”

“Careful,” Kate said with a raised eyebrow. “I’ll have you know I’m a terrifying despot who could probably turn a pencil into a deadly weapon.”

The guard’s hand jerked at the gun at his side, and Kate’s heart sped up for the quarter-second before Osgood raised her hand and gestured at him to stand back. She did lift her eyes to Kate then, her eyebrows raised as well. “Don’t tease them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kate said.

Osgood swallowed and looked away.

Interesting.

The younger woman made her move quickly thereafter, a surprising jump left with her remaining knight. Kate spent a good five minutes trying to work out a scenario in which this was a lure into a brilliant trap, before giving up and telling Osgood to take it with a pawn.

Osgood swore under her breath.

More interesting still.

They spoke only chess moves aloud until the guard returned with the requested items, handing them to Osgood instead of Kate as if the scientist might have changed her mind about letting such a dangerous criminal have them, or as if Kate were something he was trying not to touch if at all possible. Kate waited for Osgood to say, _on second thought…_ or _perhaps I should wait ‘til you’ve got a civil tongue in your head…_ She steeled her face to reveal nothing.

Osgood pushed the items across the table.

“If there’s anything besides food you need, put it down as well,” she said. “You know. Paracemetol, or…lotion, or anything.”

The pencil was dull, soft lead worn down until Kate doubted the round tip would make an impression on the slightly damp paper, probably torn from a logbook on the supply ship.

Kate should have spent the last several minutes strategizing on this rather than the chess game, but she hadn’t been willing to believe that she would be granted this after all.

Tea. Proper biscuits. Proper bread. _Jam._ Fresh veg. Cream—

Kate cut off her momentary fantasy, hard. Swallowed the saliva that had surged at the mere thought of real food, things she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, except for the tea. She would never forget the last time she had drunk tea, alone in her tower, having just made the decision that saved Osgood’s life. That Osgood now condemned her for, along with the rest of her crimes.

 _The food can be negotiated,_ Osgood had said. So it wasn’t guaranteed. Given that, what kind of test to construct…

Carefully, not wanting to tear the paper by pressing too hard, Kate wrote out a list, a few different soup flavors than the ones she already had, the first brand of pot noodle that came to mind. Pushed it back over the table.

Osgood captured Kate’s queen before picking up the paper. Her eyebrows knit together as she read down it. She looked back at Kate, her face once more unreadable stone.

“Really? You’re going to do this?”

“Do what?” Kate asked. She had mis-stepped somewhere, but where? None of the rules broken; no luxuries asked for. “You said to write out—”

“Not tell me what you really want?”

Kate considered denying it. It wasn’t as if Osgood had any hard proof she could point to. Ten years could change a person, what they dared want.

“It’s basic strategy,” she said. “Ask for nonessentials first, to test if the offer’s genuine. Base your next requests on what’s granted and what’s denied.”

“You always demanded complete honesty from me,” Osgood said. There was a muscle working in her jaw. “Is there any reason you think I would enjoy being lied to?”

 _I also told you to never let anyone know what you want,_ Kate thought, but she bit back the words before they could banish Osgood from her sight. The rules cut hard against her mouth like a bit on a horse. Like the cuffs on her wrists. “Fine. I would like some real coffee. Failing that, instant. As long as I can stop drinking something that tastes like a strawberry bubblegum factory exploded in my mouth.” Kate hesitated, forced it out: “Please.”

“I’ll think about it,” Osgood said.

 _Are you punishing me for not trusting you, or would you have said that all along?_ Kate swallowed the words, feeling them like jagged gravel in her throat. Could not force thanks past her lips; nodded in curt acknowledgement instead.

They played to a draw, Osgood checking her watch every few minutes until she gave a regretful sigh and packed the travel set away. She hesitated, at the door, looked down at the bag in her hands. “Want me to leave it for you?”

“Might be a choking hazard, mightn’t it?” Kate said dryly. “Between this and the pencil—” she tapped the offending piece of wood against the table as best she could with her limited range of motion—“I might take out a whole squadron. Best not to risk it.” When Osgood still hesitated, she found her tone softening without her intending to: “What am I going to do, play against myself? Ask you to order one of the guards to play against me? Go on. Have some more challenging games than this with your lab rats.”

“You did all right,” Osgood said. She was looking up at Kate now, a strange earnestness in her eyes. “You didn’t lose.”

“I didn’t win either,” Kate said, and Osgood’s face shifted slightly, something like disappointment on it as she turned to the door.

“Seeds,” Kate said before she knew she was going to say it.

Osgood turned back to her, a question in her eyes.

“I would like…some seeds,” Kate made herself go on. “Flowers, vegetables. I don’t care. Whatever works in this climate. Something. A garden. With your permission.”

It felt, in the moments that stretched on, like pulling open her ribcage. Letting her still-beating heart tremble in the cold air, waiting for Osgood to stab it.

(Had it felt like this when Osgood took off her clothes for her? Waiting for her scrutiny, waiting for her judgment? Did Osgood feel this when she ordered her to lay down on the bed and spread her legs, waiting for her touch, praying that it didn’t hurt?)

“All right,” Osgood said.


	2. Chapter 2

“Knight to E-4,” Kate said. “Check.”

#

_Six months earlier:_

The seeds arrived on the next boat. Oyster lettuce, broad beans, courgettes. Sea buckthorn, rosemary, marsh samphire.

It wasn’t a latitude and a longitude, but for someone with even a hint of a background in botany, it was better than a guess. Coastal Britain it was, then.

Osgood had to have known what conclusions she would draw from this. Had to remember the sunroom—didn’t she? Or was that wishful thinking, that she might have one memory of Kate that all the rancor in the world couldn’t touch?—and had granted the request anyway.

Had either trusted Kate with that information, or wanted to hold over her how close she was to a home she would never see again.

The other supplies were there too: a tin of instant coffee crystals—Kate popped the lid immediately and inhaled the aroma like ambrosia—and a crate of rustling plastic-wrapped soups and noodles. The guards dumped the box of them on the kitchen floor and Kate spent a half hour sifting through them, slowly organizing them by brand and flavor on her cabinet shelves. They were safer to contemplate than the seeds, sitting there in the second box like a gauntlet that Osgood had thrown down.

At the same time, the foodstuffs were just as mystifying; Osgood had known instantly that she hadn’t really wanted them. Had given them to her anyway, because she had asked.

She smoothed flat each piece of packing paper, half-expecting a message in Osgood’s scrawl on one of them. There was nothing.

Of course there was nothing. The message was the gift.

This was their relationship now: Kate had to use her words, Osgood chose whether to act on them. Osgood did things, and Kate tried to interpret them.

Kate took out her dull pencil and one of the larger pieces of packing paper, and begin to sketch the outline for a garden plot.

#

It was the wrong time of year to start a garden.

She assumed it was the wrong time of year to start a garden. Paying attention to the weather, and the phases of the moon, it was probably still winter, or at the latest the part of spring where winter still clung on with its sharp and grasping fingers. When, after going back and forth in her head for a week, she finally asked a guard for the date, the young woman squinted suspiciously at her and only muttered a month, which wouldn’t have been terribly useful information even if Kate had been utterly confident in its accuracy.

So she started the garden indoors.

The cottage was hardly cozy, but whoever had built it (Had it been built for her? Had Osgood sketched out this floor plan? Or had it been what was to hand, an old caretaker’s outpost hastily reworked into a prison?) had done so sturdily enough that the interior temperature was a good ten degrees higher than outdoors. Possibly more if she could have hung blankets over some of the windows to keep out the worst of the draft, but she only had the one and even if she hadn’t needed it, she had a feeling obscuring the view into her windows was the kind of thing that would result in a half-dozen guards storming the cottage, shoving her down to the floor to cuff her, and stomping all over her supplies as they searched the house for weapons or contraband or a small nuclear reactor or whatever their vivid imaginations could conjure up for that unholy terror, former Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart, daughter of Sir Alistair.

So Kate used the clear plastic packaging from the water bottles to stop up the worst of the drafts in the windows with southern and eastern exposure. Ate the soups and filled the empty styrofoam cups with a layer of bird shit scraped from the rocks at the cliff, and then dirt dug from the roots of the pine trees where it was close to being actual soil rather than sand. Pressed seeds a quarter inch into the dirt, and watered them from the tap.

It made her hands look like her hands again, like how she remembered her hands: red and chapped, a few scrapes along the knuckles where gravel had refused to give way while digging, dirt under her fingernails and a darkness in the whorls of her palm that came from working long hours with earth, that wouldn’t scrub out.

It helped to look at her hands in the moments when she could no longer look at the bare dirt, the seeds lurking below as if in indecision as to whether they would sprout. Gardening had always been something akin to faith, but it had also always been something she did in the moments she had stolen from work, looking up from an incursion or an invasion to find that nature had gone on a few steps ahead of her and was waiting for her there. Now that was her sole task, it sometimes overwhelmed her—here she was now, so powerless. Captive not only to Osgood and her unspoken rationale for keeping her former sponsor alive, but to the vagaries of cold fronts, nutrient-poor soil, and seeds that might not be strong enough to survive.

It helped to look at her hands too in the moments where she suddenly realized she had been, for a second, content—puttering around the house, checking on the angle of sun through glass, adjusting the moisture level of the soil. Her purpose reduced to this, herself reduced to a kept thing in a cage, some small mindless creature that instantly forgot iron bars when given the opportunity to run joyfully, endlessly, on a wheel to nowhere…

This was the problem with wanting things, that you might receive them and be no better off because want only ever leads to more want. Your hands shake as you cup a seedling a little closer to the light, trying to impart just a bit of the warmth your skin still holds from a Styrofoam cup of fake coffee, knowing it may be utterly futile, and you think, _I will kill myself if this doesn’t work_.

Because it all grew connected in Kate’s mind, no matter how she tried to hack and corral it with logic into straight lines, separate categories; to hold it still and contained. If the plants would not grow, then Osgood would not come back. If the plants would not grow, she would never see Beth again. If the plants would not grow, it would not have not been the soil or the sun or the too-filtered tap water; it would be her.

This was where her thoughts ran into a hard wall. This was where she could not make herself think the words that came next.

There are things that if you let yourself think them, you will know them instantly to be true.

Kate closed the door on those thoughts. She bent her head closer to dirt, inhaled its scent. Tried to let that be the only thing she thought of.

It worked, for a while.

#

The chain rang sharp against the wood of the table the second Kate heard Osgood’s tread on the front step.

The guards had come the day before to adjust the chain, only one of them looking at Kate, a scowl on his face and his hand on his holster, while the other took out their tools and added on several links, clenching the pliers tight in strong hands to make sure there would not be even a millimeter gap in the chain.

Kate had not been able to sleep all night thinking of the pliers, thinking of the sound the metal made as it bent under them. Thinking of the sounds she had made when her interrogators had bent her fingernails back with a pair just like them. Thinking of the way she had frozen, halfway to the kitchen, the second Osgood’s guards had burst through the door—frozen, her hands gone icy around her empty cup, her mind emptied out of all thought—frozen, her, the Brigade Leader, who had fought and clawed her way to a fiefdom of power and obliterated anyone who opposed her, and who now could be cowed and held still like a common prisoner, her only thought not even a thought but an image, the pliers, the pliers, the pliers—

Anything with the chain meant Osgood was coming. Osgood had been gone for two and a half weeks. Osgood had implied that a month-long absence was a punishment, so what did two and half weeks mean? More cryptic messages, more making her run her little hamster wheel, punishment, sending the guards in with the pliers. Not a word to her. But between themselves, in their barracks that might as well be a universe away, and in their reports to Osgood, they would tell her, they couldn’t have missed it: how she froze, how she looked down, away from their eyes, and held so still.

How she was gone, if not soft, then brittle.

Breakable.

What reason did Osgood have not to break her? With what Kate had done to her—

Kate’s heart was so loud when she heard Osgood’s tread on the front step that she barely heard the ring of the metal chain as she jerked back.

Then Osgood was sitting in front of her. Kate took a deep breath, tried to ignore the panicked voice inside her skull saying that she didn’t remember seeing Osgood walk into the room and sitting down; she had blacked out the three seconds of her walking into the room and sitting down—

“Anything special planned?” she asked wryly, raising her wrists in illustration. She thought it sounded wry. It was hard to hear her voice over her heart. One hour, she had to get through one hour and then she could go back to the room with no cameras and whatever was happening her brain could happen there, it would be private and it would be _fine_ \--

Osgood’s cheeks pinked and she cleared her throat. “I noticed, last time. Our game. You were still straining.”

“You reach my ripe old age and you’ll start straining too.”

“Probably even more so. You look like you’ve been keeping fit, all those walks.”

As if those walks, huddling against the wind, shadowed by silent men with guns, could take away the damage done to bone and muscle by all those years, torture and then neglect, shut up and forgotten the way she was being shut up and forgotten all over again—“Keeping a close watch on my fitness, Dr. Osgood?”

She heard the mistake as soon as the words left her mouth.

Compounded it, her eyes flicking down Osgood’s frame.

Osgood stood in one fluid motion, not even looking at Kate as she whirled towards the door.

Oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no—

“What rule did I break, dammit?” Kate shouted. She slammed the chain against the table to underscore her words, saw it scar the cheap veneer. “Tell me one thing I said wrong, tell me one thing I did—”

“One thing?” Osgood halted in the doorway, not turning, tension vibrating her frame, and Kate could weep with relief, she had wanted to escape but she hadn’t wanted the visit to be _over_ , she hadn’t wanted Osgood to be _gone_. Not for another four weeks, not for forever—

“You told me the rules,” Kate said. Her voice lower now but still ragged; the guards were halfway between her and Osgood and a second would bring hard fists and batons but she didn’t care—she would burn down this whole damn cottage and freeze to death in the cold if Osgood would just turn around and look at her, if Osgood would just take her seriously, if Osgood would say one thing that would explain why she kept Kate alive—“Don’t talk about your body. Don’t talk about what I did to you. Tell me what I said that breaks that—”

“You think—just one thing—”

Osgood turned slowly, her gaze piercing Kate straight through. She was so close, less than ten feet. Her dark eyes were narrowed, and her voice when it came was white-hot iron plunged into cold water, and it hit Kate like a whip—she felt the sting on her face as if she had been struck—she felt it jolt like electricity through her ribcage—she felt both those things fuse into something else, dark and hot and urgent between her thighs, but she would not look at that, it was not happening—

_“You know exactly what you’ve done.”_

#

Kate sat in the house, alone.

Three days now.

It had also rained for three days, but Kate had enough clarity left to know that this was an excuse, that she would not have left the house even if the sun had burst forth from the clouds and double rainbows had arched over the island.

She had ruined it.

Probably she already ruined it even before her dismal performance at that last interview. Probably the air between her and Osgood was too deeply poisoned for anything to have made a difference anyway, and certainly not at this late juncture. Probably there always would have been something, sooner or later—

But it had been sooner.

She had lost her nerve because of a damn pair of pliers, and lost control of her mouth, and Osgood had taken what control she had left after that.

Osgood had said—

It didn’t matter what Osgood had said. Kate had broken the rules, in spirit if not in letter. She knew that.

Osgood was gone.

There was nothing Kate could do to fix it now.

What was she supposed to do when there was nothing she could do to fix it now?

And Beth—

No Beth. Never again Beth. Forget Beth. Forget everything.

But she had already started remembering, and the memories would not stop. Beth’s first steps, tugging on Gordy’s hand. Beth at the funeral, her eyes perfectly blank as she stared forward, her fingers twisting and twisting at a piece of hair that had come loose, slowly ripping it from her scalp. Beth at seventeen—and now even the image fell apart, become only a voice, thin and crackling across miles on her mobile, monosyllabic: _Yes, Mum. No, Mum. Sure. I guess. Bye._

She had looked for her in the courtroom, and when she hadn’t seen her she’d been both relieved—she wouldn’t see her mother being humiliated, she would be spared that at least—and inwardly terrified—what if she was no longer alive to see this? Wouldn’t she have been there if she could have? If she still loved Kate—or even if she hated her, if she wanted to see her punished—and wouldn’t the prosecution have wanted her to be there? It was hard to imagine a star witness who could have topped her in painting the picture of Kate the government had decided on—she could have shared all sorts of juicy tidbits the audience would have eaten up with a spoon, the mother too busy oppressing the downtrodden to see her daughter learn to ride a bicycle or braid her hair—

Forget her. Forget her. Forget—

She could have asked Osgood. She could have swallowed her pride and fear and just asked, and she hadn’t. She barely knew enough about her daughter now to fit a paragraph, and it was all her fault. What was the worst Osgood could have done, said no? And now she would never say no because she was never coming back, it was Kate here with her dying plants—or never alive, never, what a joke that would be, false seeds, false hope—and the wind and the silence inside the cabin because she hadn’t been able to make herself break her silence even for her daughter, hadn’t been able to stomach being the pet project of someone whose life she used to hold in her hands.

Pride. Stupid, useless pride, and all it would get her was what she already had.

The sea, and the rain, and the silence.

#

The sun came out, and Kate forced herself to walk out to the trees with a thermos of instant coffee, the longed-for taste bitter as ash on her tongue. She forced herself to conform to some semblance of her former routine. The guards were watching.

(Was Osgood watching? Always watching, or sometimes watching? The cameras were always there, and Kat could so easily see Osgood sitting in a dark room, the image playing over her laptop--)

She made herself shower twice a week; counted under her breath to make sure she spent not a second less than ten minutes under the lukewarm spray. Clenched her fingers to keep from shielding herself when she was reminded of the cameras, from covering up all the ways age had scarred her slowly or quickly.

If going through the motions was all she had left, then she was determined to hit her mark like a trained dancer.

But she lost the tune sometimes—lost time itself. Looked up, and found the sun setting. Looked away, and when she looked back couldn’t remember what she had been trying to do with the pencil and the sheet of paper in front of her; looked at the lines, steady and sure, that looked as though they had been drawn by a hand other than her own.

Nothing belonged to her any more, even her hands.

The closest thing was the bedroom, doorless but with a way to shove the bed to grant herself a triangle of space so that the hallway camera could see only her foot at the very edge of her mattress.

She touched herself, there, trying to remember who she was. Trying to get the only kind of revenge that was left to her, casting Osgood in all those eager and willing roles that the younger woman had been so quick to forget. Osgood on her knees, Osgood splayed backwards on the bed, Osgood with her hands tied behind her back, panting, breathless.

But she couldn’t get wet, and even when she did she couldn’t get the sensation to go anywhere—all the parts of her body locked off from each other: a hand moving stubbornly through coarse curls, slow-to-respond hips jerking and retreating from sensation, a brain watching over the scene in vague confusion, disgust.

All her memories of touching Osgood were poorly wound spools of film that spilled and careened, flipping from one scenario to another before any could complete. There were gaps where time had snipped away the connecting jump cut, had bleached away the details of Osgood’s expression, and Kate couldn’t fill them in, not without wondering, not without remembering—

_no choice_

_(Osgood cries out as she takes her too roughly)_

She lay on her side in her bed, pants half down her thighs, defeated even in this.

She thought of Osgood pushing the paper across the table to her, asking her to write down anything she needed. The memory made her feel as though she were being held in the palm of firm, giant hand; domesticated, controlled. The sensation was--

She tried not to think the words that came next. Osgood might as well have collared her. Soon she would look at her through that remove of the camera lens, and see how wrong she had been to see her as a threat when she had been broken long ago, a shattered vase pasted back together enough to pass muster at a quick glance, but unable to hold water.

(Would she want to keep her then? Safe and secure in her locked cabinet of an island, would she hold her? Or would she throw her away?)

She thought of the pity Osgood would look at her—through the camera, and she would never know—when she realized, vast and inescapable as a dark lake rising around Kate. Those soft eyes and those firm words and the confident way she had pushed the pencil and paper across the table to her, willing to give her anything as long as she asked for it, as long as she submitted—

God, if she had had to burn it all down she could have at least asked for a vibrator.

She barked a laugh, muffled against cold sheets. If only. She could have burnt her bridges in a blaze of defiant glory, asking her captor to spend taxpayer money getting her rocks off. Not a half-intended innuendo because she was off her game.

And Osgood really might have sent it. Never come back, not after such a deliberate demolishing of the three simple rules she’d laid out for Kate to follow, but she might have still sent it, a cold consolation prize, another tick in the column of obligation for services rendered.

The old regime used to send prostitutes to high-level prisoners, people who had once been useful and who the sweeping winds of change might yet bring back to power. But that did not describe Kate, and anyway, those prisoners had been men, and like their counterparts in power, their appetites had been assumed to be necessities. Even in chains, their lives had mattered more than those women that were tossed their way like a handful of sweets, some mid-level flunky hedging his bets and hoping the chance to work out their frustrated passions might buy him some mercy should they ever have cause to remember his name. Osgood wouldn’t think of women like that. Osgood would never let another woman be with Kate, touch Kate—not even with Kate bound, not even if she was there to supervise—

Kate felt a flare of heat between her legs, rough desire wrapped tight around a sharp blade of want.

It died as quickly as it had come, and Kate did not know whether to be shaken or relieved.

#

The seeds still did not sprout.

Kate counted under her breath as she walked the path to the trees; kept counting as she stared out at the crash and curl of the waves. Counted all the way back to the cottage. Turned around and made the circuit again, a bitter stab of pleasure at the guards reversing their retreat into the barracks to continue to trail after her. _Sorry, boys. The old bitch changed her mind again._

As if a few more minutes of sun through the window without Kate watching might make them sprout. As if a few more minutes of putting off the inevitable meant the inevitable wouldn’t come.

But what else was there left?

There was the path, worn into the gravel and moss by her feet, a faint scar against the ground. A little more visible every time she followed it, a few uncertain tributaries branching away from it like veins, from days when she had wandered outside of her routine.

This would be the only visible mark she would leave on this world when she was gone.

There were few thick hardy green stalks poking up by the storage shed that she thought might have been thrift or spring squill. It would be another month until they bloomed and she found out, since she could hardly linger to examine the foliage there—she doubted the guards kept anything more dangerous than extra pallets there, but they disliked her hanging about nonetheless.

The principle of the thing, not to ever let her forget what she was. What she had done.

What she deserved.

There were the gulls. Rangy and wild, most of them, only a few starting to get fat and complacent off the guards’ rubbish. She brought bits of uncooked noodle to crumble and throw for them for a few days, a strategy to chip away at all that empty time that stretched out before her like the ocean all around, until the third day when the guards stopped her going out of the house and told her to put them back, that she wasn’t allowed to do that anymore.

“Thought she said I could have the birds for company,” she said, and received a shove for her troubles, a calculated push to her right shoulder blade that she was sure would read on camera as no more than a tap.

So there was the routine, and there were the small rebellions against the routine, veering right instead of left, staying out an extra twenty minutes, turning back to the cottage and then doubling back as if it had only just occurred to her that she wanted to freeze in the salt spray for a bit longer.

It hurt to break the routine. Her mind felt like it was still made of stone walls and silence, her thoughts still centuries-set mortar. She could feel herself calcifying, fossilizing; it would be so easy to become a this routine, this set of rules, this unbroken stillness, and she would never have to remember, never have to ask—

It was tempting.

She hurt herself anyway, and broke it again and again.

The guards were getting more complacent than the gulls, she noticed. Used to her little rebellions, used to them coming to nothing. On her longer walks, circumnavigating the island despite the protests of her weakened calves and the chill of her arthritic fingers shoved deep in her pockets, they sometimes fell into conversation with each other, or took a moment of the wind to smoke a fag. They sometimes lagged a whole twenty minutes behind—she timed it, counting under her breath. No particular reason.

A few times when she had to stop and sit down, they walked past without even noticing her.

She couldn’t blame them. What kind of threat could she possibly be? Even assuming she managed something like sharpening a stick into a shiv—unlikely, there were only the pines and the wood was all wrong, twisted and knotted—and had the element of surprise, she was over sixty years old and up against body armor. She could take out, at most, two guards before being torn apart in a hail of machine gun fire. Two was generous, and assumed that one of them was the heavyset bloke who was always sneaking fags and probably had a heart like a plateful of haggis.

And escape was even more absurd—the guards didn’t even have their own boat. Miles and miles of icy cold water. A nice way to end it all maybe, off one of those cliffs, if it came to that. But no more.

She tried to stave off the boredom by naming the guards. There was Haggis, of course. Red, not a particularly inspired choice given her hair, but Kate had never claimed to be a poet. Specs, equally uninspired. Bluebeard, Goldilocks, Trigger. Rogers and Astaire, who clearly wanted to fuck; Steed and Peel, who definitely already were.

If she happened to notice little weakness, little blind spots while she was naming the guards—Specs sometimes forgot his baton or his binoculars, Goldilocks lagged behind even more when the temperature dipped low—this was only habit. There was nothing she could use it for. Harmless habit, a way of keeping her brain from ossifying, to note the blind spots along a trail where a pine or a outcropping of limestone would obscure her. Habit, nothing she was planning, just something she needed, something she was clinging to with her fingernails because all she had was this planning—not real planning, not serious—stretched over a tightrope of oblivion, and entire lifetime of nothing she would never be allowed to escape—

So if she happened to notice that the guards’ radios always malfunctioned on the lee side of the island, if she happened to think , _If one were hypothetically to escape--_

#

Osgood’s eyes locked onto the bruises the second she came through the door. There were three visible: one on Kate’s jawline, one just dusting her cheekbone, one swelling her bad eye shut.

Osgood’s hand came out to rest against the doorframe. Her voice was very quiet: “What were you thinking?”

Kate leaned back in her chair as far as she was able. It wasn’t very far.

“I was bored,” she said, carefully casual. “I didn’t think you were coming by anymore.”

“So you decided to try a jailbreak.”

Kate snorted. “And where, exactly, would I have gone? It’s not as if there’s anywhere to run. I gave them the slip just to see if I was still in practice.” This many words made the bruises on her face and chest ache even more; she ignored it, focused on keeping her voice as calm as she could. _Osgood had come._ “They found me sitting peacefully under a tree in the opposite direction they thought I had gone. Had precisely zero humor about it, by the way. Hustled me back none too gently and locked me in here for a week.”

Osgood took a deep breath. Her face still looked thunderous.

“Didn’t they tell you?” Kate asked.

“Not about the bruises,” Osgood said quietly. Her hand that was not supporting her against the doorframe was clenched into a fist.

 _Didn’t you see it on camera?_ Kate thought, but of course Osgood was only checking the footage sporadically, if at all. Of course she had an entire life that had nothing to do with one recalcitrant prisoner.

The ache deepened in her ribcage, bruised skin pulling tight.

“It was a shocking lack of discipline,” she said as lightly as she could. “Any time you want me to give you pointers on middle management, let me know.”

“They don’t—” Osgood shook her head, huffed. Retracted and rephrased whatever little insight into the power structure she had been about to impart. “Don’t joke about it. And don’t try to trick me into telling you things.”

“You wouldn’t have to worry about that if you didn’t visit,” Kate pointed out. Hesitated. Too much, too soon? “I…didn’t think you would be visiting again.”

Osgood’s gaze swung away to the window. A muscle clenched in her jaw. “I thought about it.”

Kate did not think she could tear her gaze away from Osgood, from every detail of the tension of her brow and the set of her shoulders, the rise and fall of her breath—not quite condensing in the cold air—and the stance of her feet. She felt as though she had been starving for the sight of her, with no expectation of satiation.

The silence stretched between them like paper-thin ice over a pond; Kate was loathe to break it.

“What were you thinking?” Osgood asked the windowpane.

There was no way to explain. Kate felt this now. Their paths had diverged ten years ago and it had turned them into two different people, who spoke two different languages with no hope of translation.

“You’re giving me positive reinforcement, you know,” Kate said instead. “Coming here because I did this. Not being consistent. You should know better, a scientist like you.”

“Intermittent positive reinforcement is actually more effective than consistent,” Osgood said, looking back at Kate. Was that the ghost of a smile, for just a second? “And I find behaviorism overrated, for conscious beings who are capable of rational thought and analyzing their own actions.” No, no trace of a smile at all, only a tremble of lips, as if she were holding her face as stiff as she could: “Were you trying to kill yourself?”

The words hung in the air, and Kate did not know how to answer.

She hadn’t been. Of course she hadn’t.

But she couldn’t make herself say it.

She cracked her neck instead, to give herself an excuse to look away from those dark eyes. “Maybe I’m just acting out,” she said. “Trying to get your attention.”

This was skirting close to the edge of breaking the rules, but Osgood just sucked her teeth. “Why would you do that.”

“Trying to figure out what you want with me?” It came out as the question that Osgood’s response had not been.

“I told you.” Her voice flat. Her eyes still burning a hole in Kate. “I owe you.”

“So you saved me from the chopping block,” Kate said. “Consider the debt paid. A life for a life.”

“I owe more than that,” Osgood said. Voice soft, eyes hard; who had she become, what did that person want? “We both know I wouldn’t have lasted another month in the Tower if you hadn’t taken me under your wing.”

 _Took you under considerably more than that,_ Kate didn’t say.

 _You paid for that_ , she didn’t say either.

They both knew that Osgood had paid, with what, and how much.

“I owe you,” Osgood repeated. “And you owe me.”

“For saving my life with your testimony, yes, I know,” Kate began testily.

“No, more than that,” Osgood interrupted. The low volume of her voice could not contain the fury, slowly building like dying embers catching fire. “I told you—‘Kate Stewart’s bitch.’ It was a joke to them. They kept me in a kennel for two weeks. It would have been worse if Bambera hadn’t—Even after they stopped, I was only ever a tool. Useful. Needing to be tested, over and over again.” Her voice caught. “They had just started to forget. They had just started to treat me like—I had coworkers who were new, who didn’t know any of it. I could be a person.”

The penny dropped. “And then the testimony.”

“And then the testimony,” Osgood agreed.

“They could have put me away without you,” Kate said. “You didn’t need to—”

“They would have killed you without me.”

“So you own me forever?” Kate asked. “I was ready to die. I didn’t ask you to save me.”

“I didn’t ask you to save me either,” Osgood said. “But you did.”

“Am that’s bad, apparently?” Kate asked.

Osgood laughed, a tired, broken thing. “You don’t understand.” She looked at Kate, something in her gaze wounded but not as if by anything Kate had said, no, like the scar was old and flaring up in the winter chill, a familiar pang. “Of course you don’t understand. What it took. To go up there. To remind everyone what you did to me—how you humiliated me—”

_("Little slut," Kate had whispered in Osgood’s ear, her hand sliding over her backside to squeeze, “so desperate for it—” and Osgood had arched into the touch, blushing bright red as a moan caught in her throat, just loud anyone that anyone passing by might hear how much she wanted it--)_

“What do you want?” Kate asked. Her voice came out tired. How long had she been tired? It felt like more than a lifetime. “For me to apologize? For me to say I’m sorry for the way the world was and that I didn’t do a damned thing to change it because I wasn’t strong enough?”

“No.” Osgood shook her head. “Any apology you ever made would be a lie.”

And that was why she had never apologized, not when Osgood whimpered, not when she flinched, not when she looked at Kate with those big dark eyes that asked what she had done wrong. She had not apologized because apologies changed nothing and she had thought the world was set in stone—and wasn’t it? Governments rose and fell, people feinted at democracy and made gestures towards equality, but under the shimmering veil it was all still power struggles and desire and scrambling towards both with claws out—and since it was not a world in which she could offer kindness, she had tried to offer the truth.

_It is a simple economic transaction_

“—never had a choice,” Osgood was saying. Her voice had not risen, but she was vibrating with anger. “You saved my life by making me dependent on you, and then you sent me away without a word, with the kiss just a trick, I missed you, and then—” She wheezed.

“Inhaler,” Kate said automatically.

For a second, she thought this was what would finally make Osgood shoot her.

Then the younger woman pulled out the inhaler and took a puff. She looked away from Kate again, out over the breaking waves.

“The seeds aren’t sprouting yet?” she asked abruptly.

Ah. Not the ocean, but the bare dirt where nothing grew.

“No,” Kate said. “It’s too cold. Or I’ve lost my touch.”

“You kept orchids alive on a Brigade Leader’s schedule,” Osgood said. “I don’t think it’s that.”

“Perhaps.”

“You’ll…try again?”

Kate heard the other question underneath that.

“Not much else to do here, is there?”

Osgood swung her gaze back to Kate, inscrutable once more apart from sheer intensity, as though she were examining Kate under a microscope.

“You’re not drinking the strawberry stuff anymore.”

“Would you?” Kate asked dryly.

Osgood crossed her arms. “It’s supplemented with vitamins. You didn’t notice?”

“In passing,” Kate said. “I must admit I was primarily focused on the sheer gall of the manufacturing company to call that flavor ‘strawberry.’” She understood this conversation less and less. “If you wanted me to take vitamins, why didn’t you just send them?”

Osgood raised her chin a little bit, as if that would give her just the right vantage point as she dissected Kate where she sat. “If the next supply run brought calcium and B12 supplements, would you take them?”

Kate interlaced her fingers, settled her hands on her lap. It kept her from clenching them. “I think that rather depends on you, doesn’t it?”

“How so?”

“Don’t be obtuse; it’s never been convincing.” Kate jerked her chin to indicate her well-appointed cage. “If you want me to do something, order me.”

Osgood sighed. “I’m not asking because I want your obedience.”

Her jaw worked for a second, weighing words; there was something in her eyes not quite like pleading, as if she were waiting for Kate to fill in the blanks.

Kate couldn’t.

The realization of that settled in Osgood’s eyes like another touch on that old wound.

“I’m asking because I want you to want to take them. I want you to want…to stay alive.”

 _Why?_ Kate wanted to ask. _Reward for everything I saved you from? Punishment for everything I didn’t?_

But it did not matter.

It only mattered that Osgood had asked.

“All right,” Kate said.

There was a long silence, Osgood still looking at her.

Then Osgood sat down in her chair.


End file.
